Horrorporn/Pornhorror: The Problematic Communities and Contexts of Online Shock Imagery

Abstract

Making an assessment of pornography and horror genres is problematic, not only because judgments of these have frequently been based on moral or ideological beliefs about what constitutes obscenity, but also because the viewing context impacts so significantly on their meaning. Obscene images are offensive because they contravene moral principles or because they portray what is considered to be indecent or repugnant. They are not necessarily sexual, although sexual behaviours are typically positioned as hidden or shameful in many societies. The conjunction of sex and other taboos such as defecation increases a depiction’s propensity to offend. The body’s uncivil nature - its sexual urges and the production of waste - may be inextricable from the self, but we are required to denounce those aspects of being, even though they can never be banished altogether (McAfee, 2004: 46). For Kristeva, this attempt at exclusion is a defining feature of subjectivity; “‘I’ expel it…I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself” (Kristeva, 1982: 3). In this violent process of abjection the ‘Other’ comes to stand in for “repressed…pathological violence and sexual perversion” (Bogue & Conis-Pope, 1996: 11).

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